DOE's Office of Energy Dominance Financing Shifts Federal Energy Loans to Nuclear, Gas and the Grid
On 5 October 2026 the Department of Energy offered Vistra a conditional loan of up to $4.2 billion to boost output at three nuclear plants, Beaver Valley in Pennsylvania and Davis-Besse and Perry in Ohio. The deal adds 433 megawatts and keeps about 4 gigawatts running for another twenty years. A month earlier DOE closed a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa.
These are the latest loans from what used to be called the Loan Programs Office. Since January it has been the Office of Energy Dominance Financing. The new name signals a change in what Washington’s biggest energy lender will pay for.
Unwinding the old book
The office was built up under the Biden administration as a major tool for clean energy, with loans for battery plants, wind and solar projects, and transmission. The new administration reviewed the lot.
On 23 July 2025 DOE cancelled a conditional guarantee of up to $4.9 billion for the Grain Belt Express transmission line across the Midwest. On 1 October 2025 it terminated 321 grants and awards for 223 projects, worth about $7.56 billion, across several offices. In January 2026 it said it had reviewed $104 billion in loans and commitments and restructured, revised or eliminated more than $83 billion. About $9.5 billion of wind and solar lending was cut, almost $30 billion was de-obligated and about $53 billion was being revised. The renamed office has more than $289 billion of lending authority available.
The new book
The loans since then show the priorities.
In October 2025 DOE lent $1.5 billion to Wabash Valley Resources to turn an idle coal-gasification plant in Indiana into a fertiliser plant. In February 2026 it closed the largest loan package in its history, $26.5 billion to two Southern Company utilities for more than 16 gigawatts of capacity: new gas, nuclear uprates and licence extensions, hydro, batteries and more than 1,300 miles of transmission. DOE says customers will save more than $7 billion.
In June it offered conditional commitments of $17.5 billion for a nuclear supply chain programme, up to five loans to buy long-lead parts for ten Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, each project needing $1 billion of equity. It also closed $3.26 billion with AEP Texas for grid modernisation in July, and $489 million for Puerto Rico’s grid in August.
Add it up and the office closed about $34 billion in loans in 2026 and made about $22 billion in conditional commitments. Almost all of it went to nuclear, gas and the grid.
What changed, and what didn’t
The tool is the same. A federal lender takes risks that private banks won’t, at interest rates close to the Treasury’s own, and the money comes back if the projects work. The targets have changed. Under Biden the office favoured new clean technologies. Now it favours firm power, generation that runs regardless of weather, and the wires to move it. Transmission is one of the few things both lists share, though Grain Belt shows that even that depends on the project.
It fits DOE’s wider grid strategy. The department argues the grid is short of reliable capacity as data centres drive demand, which is the same case behind its emergency orders keeping coal plants open.
How other governments finance energy
Most rich countries have a public lender in energy. Germany’s KfW, the European Investment Bank and Britain’s National Wealth Fund all lend for power and grids. The EIB and the National Wealth Fund lean heavily toward low-carbon projects. The US now stands out for steering its lender toward gas and nuclear together, while cutting back wind and solar.
Nuclear is the overlap. Almost every government that lends for energy is now backing nuclear in some form, from new builds to restarts. Duane Arnold, shut in 2020 and now getting $1.9 billion to come back, is the kind of project that might have been financed under either administration. That’s a good test of where policy has really moved, and where it just changed its name.